Jim Hightower's Lowdown

Throughout the country, newspaper subscribers are asking questions like: Hey, who took my Saturday paper? What happened to those political cartoons and columns that I liked? Why does it take two days to get election results and sports scores? How did my local paper get filled with filler? Oh... and who doubled the price of the damn thing? The cause of all of the above is a Wall Street concept called “financialization” – a euphemism for corporate plundering. Multibillion-dollar hedge funds like SoftBank Group, Alden Global Capital, and Chatham Asset have bought up thousands of our dailies and weeklies. They extract enormous profits, not by making a better journalistic product for customers and the community, but by eliminating reporters, selling off each paper’s real estate and assets, shriveling and standardizing content… and jacking up the paper’s price. Like avaricious airlines, the profit strategy of these Wall Street newspapers is to monopolize the market, then charge more for less. But won’t readers stop subscribing? Of course – they’re leaving in droves, but hedge fund profiteers don’t care, for their plan is to strip-mine the business of every dime it has, take the profits, and leave town. For example, SoftBank, the Japanese owner of the Gannett chain, has pillaged hundreds of our local papers, and it’s now making another round of deep cuts in its newsrooms, including dumping some 800 more journalists. The financializer are also requiring other employees to take unpaid leave and are suspending payments to their pensions. SoftBank bosses simply said, “we need to ensure our balance sheet remains strong.” Sure, take care of Number One! But what about ensuring that local journalism remains strong, providing the information and connections that communities must have for strong democracies? But don’t be silly – that’s not part of the hedge fund business model.

My newspaper died. Well, technically it still appears, but it has no life, no news, and barely a pulse. It’s a mere semblance of a real paper, one of the hundreds of local journalism zombies staggering along in cities and towns that had long relied on them. Each one has a bare number of subscribers keeping it going, mostly longtime readers like me clinging to a memory of what used to be and a flickering hope that, surely, the thing won’t get worse. Then it does. Our papers are getting worse (at a time we desperately need them to get better) because they are no longer mediums of journalism, civic purpose, and local identity. Rather, they’ve been reduced to little more than profit siphons, steadily piping local money to a handful of distant, high-finance syndicates that have bought out our hometown journals. My daily, the Austin American-Statesman, was swallowed up in 2019 by the nationwide Gannett chain, becoming one of more than 1,000 local papers Gannett presently mass produces under its corporate banner, “The USA Today Network.” But even that reference is a deception, for the publication doesn’t confide to readers that it’s actually a product of SoftBank Group, a multibillion-dollar Japanese financial consortium that owns and controls Gannett. SoftBank has no interest in Austin as a place, a community, or even as a newspaper market, nor does it care one whit about advancing the principles of journalism. It’s in the profit business, extracting maximum short-term payouts from the properties it owns. This has rapidly become the standard business model for American newspapering. Today, more than half of all daily papers in America are in the grip of just 10 of these money syndicates. That’s why our “local” papers are dying. It’s not failure of journalism, but of absentee corporate owners plundering journalism.

The problem with our so-called “free market” is that it’s not free for you and me. It’s largely controlled by monopolies, which are free to inflate prices just because they can, letting gougers gleefully extract unwarranted monopoly profits from us. This milking of consumers by tightly consolidated industries is propelling today’s surging price hikes. Brand name corporations claim they’re being forced to mark-up price tags just to cover rising costs for raw materials, labor, transportation, etc. But in a competitive marketplace, they’d have to eat much of those increases by taking a bit less in profits. Instead, monopolies are now raising prices simply to squeeze even greater profits from hard-hit consumers – a game of corporate greed that socks America with more inflation. Consider diapers. A year ago, Procter & Gamble announced that the pandemic was driving up its production costs, forcing it to raise prices for its Pampers brand. At the time, it had just posted a quarterly profit of $3.8 billion, so P&G could easily have absorbed a temporary rise in its costs. But instead of holding the price to ease their customers’ economic pain, the conglomerate used a global health crisis to justify upping diaper prices. Six months later, P&G’s quarterly profit topped $5 billion. And – in that same quarter – P&G spent $3 billion to buy back shares of its own stock, a Wall Street manipulation that artificially bloats the wealth of top execs and other big shareholders. In short, P&G used the excuse of inflation to inflate the price of diapers, then used the extra money it extracted to inflate the value of its stock to benefit rich shareholders. Well, couldn’t consumers just switch to Huggies, the brand sold by P&G’s main “competitor”? No, for it’s a co-monopolist, having also goosed up its prices. Welcome to the monopoly merry-go-round.

Today, CEOs of big corporations are playing the tricky “Inflation Blame Game!” Publicly, they moan that the pandemic is slamming their poor corporations with factory shutdowns, supply chain delays, wage hikes, and other increased costs. But wait – inside their board rooms, executives are high fiving each other and pocketing bonuses. What’s going on? The trick is that these giants are in non-competitive markets operating as monopolies, so they can set prices, mug you and me, and scamper away with record profits. In 2019 for example, before the pandemic, corporate behemoths hauled in roughly a trillion dollars in profit. In 2021, during the pandemic, they grabbed more than $1.7 trillion. This huge profit jump accounts for 60% of the inflation now slapping US families! Take supermarket goliath Kroger. Its CEO gloated last summer that “a little bit of inflation is always good in our business,” adding that “we’ve been very comfortable with our ability to pass on [price] increases” to consumers. “Comfortable” indeed. Last year, Kroger used its monopoly pricing power to reap record profits, then it spent $1.5 billion of those gains not to benefit consumers or workers, but to buy back its own stock – a scam that siphons profits to top executives and big shareholders. Or take the fast-food purveyor McDonalds’s. It bragged to its shareholders that despite the supply disruptions of the pandemic and higher costs for meat and labor, its top executives had used the chain’s monopoly power in 2021 to up prices, thus increasing corporate profits by a stunning 59% over the previous year. And the game goes on: “We’re going to have the best growth we’ve ever had this year,” Wall Street banking titan Jamie Dimon exulted at the start of 2022. Hocus Pocus, this is how the rich get richer and inequality “happens.”

Last year’s gubernatorial race in Virginia was narrowly won by Republican Glenn Youngkin. An elite Wall Street multimillionaire, he was going to lose – until he discovered a right-wing racist bugaboo called Critical Race Theory. Glenn suddenly turned into an anti-CRT attack dog, fomenting parental fear and promising to sweep all teaching of the theory out of Virginia classrooms. But, golly, CRT was not actually taught in any of the state’s public schools. To help Youngkin dodge this inconvenient fact, a partisan front group called Metric Media created 25 fake news sites in Virginia that ran nearly 5,000 articles during the election, spreading the CRT bugaboo. While these “papers” have no subscribers and no significant readership, they allow demagogues like Youngkin to use such lies in speeches, ads, etc. – laundering them as facts by simply saying: “As reported in the Such-and Such newspaper…” With success in Virginia, Metric Media and other fake sites are pumping out CRT sludge in Florida, Texas, and other states with gubernatorial races this year. Indeed, the lie has become its own political industry, with such billionaire extremists as the Koch brothers’ pumping money into it. This is why America must have actual local newspapers (widely available and affordable, either in print or online) that have the community commitment and journalistic resources to do the job of nurturing truth and democracy. Otherwise, we’re ceding “news” to the shams and scams that are inevitable under hedge fund profiteers and networks of partisan hacks that already dominate wide swaths of America’s media landscape. Journalism is not a private commodity to be controlled by a few for their personal profit or political advancement – it is an essential public resource, key to democratic self-government. And America should start investing in it as such, providing adequate public funding for local, independent, watchdog reporting.

It’s been an all-time record year of runaway wealth for America’s billionaires, with this tiny clique vastly widening the chasm separating them from us hoi polloi. For example, Amazon jefe Jeff Bezos hauled in $190 billion for the year. That pays him more than $360,000 a minute, for every single minute of the year. So much taken by so few who do so little while harming so many. Bezos erected his corporate empire on the backs of non-union workers he routinely exploits, plus millions of taxpayers he bilks. Indeed, his recent surge of wealth comes not from innovation or hard work, but from the windfall of bloated Wall Street stock prices, making him richer without lifting a finger. Yet media and politicians hail Jeff as a Big Thinking Genius! Seriously? This self-centered ego’s top achievement this year was to have the world’s largest superyacht built for him – a 400 foot-long, sea going palace. But – oops! – Jeff’s pleasure craft can’t get to the ocean, because it’s too tall to go under a bridge just downriver from the Dutch city where he’s having it built. No problem for a billionaire “genius,” though – Boss Bezos simply instructed local officials to dismantle their historic bridge so his toy could pass through. But, no go, for outraged locals learned of his imperious scheme and quickly organized a massive rotten-egg brigade, pledging to pelt the colossal yacht (and possibly Jeff). Very bad political optics. So, the American mogul’s billions were not allowed to buy his way out. It’s still unclear how he’ll get it out to sea. But one Dutch wag helpfully pointed out to him: “You can still take your giant boat out for short trips down to the bridge and back.” If these mega-rich privileged ones are so smart, why are they so stupid?

Let me say one word to you: Nuts. Now, let me say one name to you: Ted Cruz. They’ve become synonymous, with the Texas lawmaker perennially topping national lists of goofy, right-wing political goobers. Only, Ted can’t rightly be called a lawmaker, for he’s not a serious participant in that process, instead devoting his senatorship to political stunts and picking silly PR fights with a growing list of enemies. Running out of people to attack, Ted has found another species for his vitriol: Fictional icons. He’s been padding his right-wing credentials by going after Mr. Potato Head, Mickey and Pluto, and, believe it or not, Muppets. This US senator has dedicated the power and public resources of his office to demonize popular creatures on “Sesame Street,” specifically Big Bird and loveable little Elmo. Ted rants he has proof that Muppets are covert tools of “government propaganda.” So, this ridiculous excuse of a senator is saving America from… Muppets. But for a whole bag of assorted nuttiness, you can’t beat Sen. Rick Scott’s 11-point plan to “Rescue America.” A disgraced former healthcare mogul, this mega-millionaire reinvented himself as a wingnut Florida senator, and he now chairs a policy arm of the Republican Party. In February, he set forth a stunning agenda of far-out right-wing extremism that he says his party will push if they re-take the senate this November, including: Implementing new federal taxes on the poorest half of Americans. So – as Scott puts it – they’ll “have skin in the game.” “Stopping socialism” by terminating Social Security and Medicare. Spending unlimited billions to build Donald Trump’s folly of a border wall (and, ironically, naming the scam after The Donald). Fiddle-faddlers like Cruz and Scott have turned the once-proud US Senate into The Little Nut Shoppe on the Hill.

Question: What does a packet of M&M’s and your local veterinarian have in common? Answer: Both are owned by Mars Inc., the global candy monopolist. Since the 1980s, we’ve seen massive consolidations in industry after industry – from airlines to newspapers, the internet to candy. These monopolists run roughshod over consumers, workers, communities, suppliers, and our nation’s commitment to the Common Good. And now the corporate attitude seems to be, “what the Hell, why not let monopolization go to the dogs?” This change has been led by “private equity groups.” They are corporate-takeover sharks that borrow billions of dollars to buy out, plunder, then sell off the remnants of established businesses. They target enterprises that can be grabbed on the cheap but have assets like a loyal customer base. Then the sharks raise prices on those customers while cutting staff and quality of service. This has been happening to thousands of local vet practices and hospitals, which have quietly been plucked by Wall Street entities bearing non-descript acronyms like IVC, JAB, KKR, and VCA. At first locals don’t notice the takeover, because the corporate outfit not only buys your friendly “Dr. Barry Bones” vet service, they also buy the Doc’s name. As an IVC takeover consultant confided: “People like to take their dog to local vets and not feel like it’s a corporate machine.” But increasingly, it is. Solo practitioners who became veterinarians to provide friendly, community-based service now must answer to bean counters at headquarters – and, foremost, they must serve profit over animals. Veterinary Center of America (VCA), for example, is one of the most aggressive monopolizers, controlling access to and prices charged by 1,000+ vet facilities in 43 states. In 2017, VCA was taken over by Mars Inc. One feisty group battling monopolizers is the National Veterinary Professionals Union – Get info at natvpu.org.

For many people, the animals they adopt and love become more like family members than pets. We have deep relationships, with cats, dogs, parrots, goats, horses, and other fellow critters – who at least pretend to love us back, providing comfort and joy all around. Sadly though, life for all of us animals is a spin around the wheel of fortune, so illness and injuries happen. That’s why one of the most valued members of every community are the staffers in our local veterinarian office. Practically all vets, nurses, technicians, and support staff are there chiefly because they love animals and get personal satisfaction from providing care for them. When I say they are “there,” I not only mean 9 to 5, but this group of independent health providers are committed to being there when needed – including off hours and days off, for animal misfortune and suffering don’t go by clocks and calendars. Local practitioners also try to be there for low-income people, offering deferred payment plans and even discounted fees so their animals can get the treatment they need. But wait – sound the ambulance sirens! Something is going horribly wrong! This venerable profession has recently been collapsing into a corporate model of Wall Street owned chains. They are monopolizing markets, reducing staff, gutting service, and prioritizing the love of money over the love of animals. It’s not uncommon these days for franticly-worried customers to bring an ill or injured pet into their old reliable vet office only to find it has quietly come under chain ownership, is understaffed, and is unwilling to accept the patient, forcing a desperate scramble to find emergency care, often out of town. This is Jim Hightower saying... The same profiteering corporate mentality that has proven disastrous for human health care is now rapidly locking down pet care – and that’s an act of animal cruelty.

What makes a newspaper great? Many say it’s having street-savvy reporters and editors with the integrity to shine the light of investigative journalism on the power structure’s abuses. But, no, says Fred Ryan, top executive of the Washington Post – the secret is attendance. Ryan, a corporate manager and former Ronald Reagan staffer, was handpicked to be CEO of the legendary paper by Jeff Bezos in 2014, when the Amazon billionaire bought the Post. But on Ryan’s watch, readership is in decline, which he blames on newsroom sluggards who don’t spend enough time in the office. So, he’s become the hall monitor, measuring reporters’ productivity by their office attendance. Fred seems unaware that a good reporter’s real work is out on the beat, not sitting in front of a computer. No doubt he would’ve fired Woodward and Bernstein for being out of the office so often to meet with Deep Throat to uncover Nixon’s Watergate scandal. In Fairness, though, he apparently has a 2-part plan to boost team spirit: (1) Eliminate 100 reporters, and (2) judge the output of those remaining by counting the number of video conferences they attend each week. But that’s hardly the totality of Ryan’s innovations. The big news is that he’s hired not one, but two, high-dollar PR firms to create a cutting edge “branding strategy” for the Post. Already they’ve come up with a spiffy new corporate slogan: “We don’t just break news. We break ground.” Wow – how great is that? (Never mind that some wags have changed the second line to, “We break wind”). When overpaid incompetents like Ryan substitute slogans and computer metrics for real solutions, they’re admitting that they are the problem – that they simply don’t know how to motivate and manage a creative workforce. They should resign in embarrassment.

When Supreme Court member Sam Alito’s secret plan for canceling the constitutional right of women to end their pregnancies leaked out to the public – Republican politicos went ballistic! Over the leak, that is. The Court’s Republican Chief Justice, John Roberts, called the unauthorized disclosure an “affront” to the majesty of the Supremes. Likewise, Republican congressional leaders have furiously demanded to know who dunnit and why! Way beyond their political screeching and posturing, however, a Pennsylvania woman quietly wrote a letter to the New York Times that calmly posed a couple of honest, more-fundamental questions: “Why are Supreme Court votes and processes so hidden in the first place?” And “How did this grip on secrecy become so sacrosanct?” After all, as important and enormously-powerful as this tiny body is, it’s still a governmental agency doing public business that affects every American. So the legal work that the nine members of this ultimate judicial authority do – including their internal machinations to reach such awesome decisions as nullifying fundamental human rights – ought to be transparent to all who will be affected. The ugly truth is that today’s Third Branch of government has needlessly, dangerously, and rather ludicrously become a black-robed autocracy. Bear in mind that these nine individuals are enrobed for life, choose the cases they consider, make up their own rules of ethical conduct, operate almost entirely behind closed doors, can conspire to issue decrees – and the bare majority of only five of them can arbitrarily overrule president’s, congresses, states, other courts, voters… and your own personal life-decisions. And now comes a six-person GOP majority of supreme justices determined to entrench corporate plutocracy, right-wing theocracy, and Republican sovereignty over all of us. That’s why we must finally lift the medieval level of secrecy the partisan judges are using to shroud their actions.

Mitch McConnell, the perpetually sour old goose who heads the Senate Republican Caucus, had a hissy fit when the news leaked out that American women are about to have their most fundamental constitutional right taken from them by a cabal of Supreme Court judges. What made Mitch twitch, of course, was not the bad news for women… but the leak. He huffed that revealing the right-wing Court’s scheme to the public was a “stunning breach,” spewing that it’s “an attack on the independence of the Supreme Court.” Uh, Mitch… the so-called Supremes have been meeting behind closed doors specifically to plot an all-out attack on the independence of some 170 million women to control their own bodies. Why aren’t you opposing the secrecy, rather than supporting the Court’s subversion of women’s liberty? Perversely, the entire Republican leadership is outraged by the leak, rather than the attack on women. Right-wing blowhard Ted Cruz, for example, yapped that informing the public “will do lasting damage to the integrity of the Court.” Uh, Ted… you and your ideological ilk annihilated the Court’s integrity – and its legitimacy – when you stacked it with a covey of corporate-coddling partisan hacks like Alito, Barrett, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Thomas. Then came Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, a Trump acolyte, ludicrously blathering that the leak of the judicial plan is “despicable.” Why? Well, he explained to us commoners, the Court “is not a political body.” If ignorance is bliss, Mike must be ecstatic! The GOP majority on this court is so immersed in its own partisan biases that it is routinely ruling against workers, the environment, women, voting rights, local communities… and democracy itself. No surprise then that public trust in the integrity of these “arbiters of justice” is crashing. If the Court won’t respect our democratic ideals, the people won't respect the Court.

Here are two terms you don’t expect to see together: “The state of Alabama” and “progressive leader.” (Ok, I’m a Texan, so I have no standing to point at the rank regressiveness of any other state government … but still, Alabama?) And yet, the Camellia State has flowered as a model of strong progressive action in one area of critical public importance: Quality child care. It’s a cliche to say “our children are our future,” but it’s also true. Why, then, do we invest so little in our littlest ones, our future? America’s childcare system is a national disgrace, failing to provide safe places for children of working parents, and failure to boost the education of pre-kindergarten tykes. Moreover, the abject failure of state and national officials to meet this basic social need is spreading inequality, rolling back opportunities for women, and severely restricting economic progress. Yet, Alabama officials have recently been setting the national standard for effective pre-K programs by making a major investment in its 4 &5-year-olds, operating a statewide child care network in about 1,300 neighborhood and rural areas. A major factor in its success is a two-generation approach, not only educating the kiddos, but also providing support materials and coaching so that parents engage as their children’s “first teachers.” Producing demonstrable results year after year, the state’s public network gets bipartisan support and funding from the Alabama Legislature. The program is free and available to all, with special attention devoted to enlisting often overlooked families in rural, poor, and people-of-color communities. Rather than treating teachers as low-pay babysitters, Alabama is paying (and respecting) them as the professionals they are and investing in their career development. If one of our poorest states can rise to meet this basic human need, what’s wrong with the richest country in the history of the world?

Question: What does a packet of M&M’s and your local veterinarian have in common? Answer: Both are owned by Mars Inc., the global candy monopolist. Since the 1980s, we’ve seen massive consolidations in industry after industry – from airlines to newspapers, the internet to candy. These monopolists run roughshod over consumers, workers, communities, suppliers, and our nation’s commitment to the Common Good. And now the corporate attitude seems to be, “what the Hell, why not let monopolization go to the dogs?” This change has been led by “private equity groups.” They are corporate-takeover sharks that borrow billions of dollars to buy out, plunder, then sell off the remnants of established businesses. They target enterprises that can be grabbed on the cheap but have assets like a loyal customer base. Then the sharks raise prices on those customers while cutting staff and quality of service. This has been happening to thousands of local vet practices and hospitals, which have quietly been plucked by Wall Street entities bearing non-descript acronyms like IVC, JAB, KKR, and VCA. At first locals don’t notice the takeover, because the corporate outfit not only buys your friendly “Dr. Barry Bones” vet service, they also buy the Doc’s name. As an IVC takeover consultant confided: “People like to take their dog to local vets and not feel like it’s a corporate machine.” But increasingly, it is. Solo practitioners who became veterinarians to provide friendly, community-based service now must answer to bean counters at headquarters – and, foremost, they must serve profit over animals. Veterinary Center of America (VCA), for example, is one of the most aggressive monopolizers, controlling access to and prices charged by 1,000+ vet facilities in 43 states. In 2017, VCA was taken over by Mars Inc. One feisty group battling monopolizers is the National Veterinary Professionals Union – Get info at natvpu.org.

For many people, the animals they adopt and love become more like family members than pets. We have deep relationships, with cats, dogs, parrots, goats, horses, and other fellow critters – who at least pretend to love us back, providing comfort and joy all around. Sadly though, life for all of us animals is a spin around the wheel of fortune, so illness and injuries happen. That’s why one of the most valued members of every community are the staffers in our local veterinarian office. Practically all vets, nurses, technicians, and support staff are there chiefly because they love animals and get personal satisfaction from providing care for them. When I say they are “there,” I not only mean 9 to 5, but this group of independent health providers are committed to being there when needed – including off hours and days off, for animal misfortune and suffering don’t go by clocks and calendars. Local practitioners also try to be there for low-income people, offering deferred payment plans and even discounted fees so their animals can get the treatment they need. But wait – sound the ambulance sirens! Something is going horribly wrong! This venerable profession has recently been collapsing into a corporate model of Wall Street owned chains. They are monopolizing markets, reducing staff, gutting service, and prioritizing the love of money over the love of animals. It’s not uncommon these days for franticly-worried customers to bring an ill or injured pet into their old reliable vet office only to find it has quietly come under chain ownership, is understaffed, and is unwilling to accept the patient, forcing a desperate scramble to find emergency care, often out of town. This is Jim Hightower saying... The same profiteering corporate mentality that has proven disastrous for human health care is now rapidly locking down pet care – and that’s an act of animal cruelty.